THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 12-01-02: MOMENT

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 12-01-02: MOMENT; Irrational Exuberance

Published: December 1, 2002

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Piecing together its aesthetic lexicon from morsels of Bauhaus rigor and midcentury formalism, with a dash of 60's Op Art and 70's shag-pile thrown in for fun, Wallpaper created a hermetically sealed, self-referential world that spun endlessly, glossily around on itself. It wasn't just about furniture, or fashion, or travel. It was about an oddly compelling future view in which Djibouti and S-o Paulo and Helsinki were equally plausible, equally accessible locales in which to conduct the fundamental human drama of being stylish. This was a kind of globalism far removed from the barricades or the boardrooms: a mix of cheery apolitical acquisitiveness and fashionably jaded ennui, in which all prices were listed in local currency and all travel was conducted in business class.

At first glance stimulating, at second glance clearly simulating, the magazine's essential aura of insubstantiality was underscored by the fact that most of the rooms on display in Wallpaper's décor pages were not the actual (if unattainable) domestic spaces of other high-end shelter books; they were deliberately unconvincing studio sets that could be snapped together anywhere you wanted: a set of fake walls and some artfully arranged $6,000 hard plastic sofas. Onto these uncomfortable items were draped an array of waxy, vacant-eyed models, themselves draped in this or that designer's couture. In their static approximation of ''good times'' by the pool or in the playroom or the kitchen, these Stepford kids came across as bloodless, desireless, despite the spare-nothing lifestyle at their manicured fingertips and their implied ambisexual antics. Immaculate in their plasticity, they bordered on the posthuman.

The magazine's oracular pronouncements were equally, utterly deadpan. ''The bathroom should feel like a spa from a brilliant Asian hotel,'' the pages instructed. Or, ''Wallpaper is a strong advocate of residential addresses in W1.''

Brûlé called the whole thing ''an exercise in optimism.'' Others called it ''yuppie porn.'' Like it or hate it, though, Wallpaper under Brûlé's reign -- unashamedly aspirational, obsessively stylish, flamboyantly free of care -- captured all the frenzied vacuity of end-of-millennium life.

But it soon became clear that Wallpaper couldn't get the word out all on its own. ''Originally,'' Brûlé confesses, ''I thought that besides the U.K., we might sell a few copies in Sydney, Toronto, New York or L.A., and that would be it. But by the fourth issue, the newsstand data suggested that the magazine was very influential. And we got a lot of press. And we weren't doing that great in the U.K. after all. And I thought that if this is going to really fly, and it was going to have more clout internationally, then we needed a proper international partner.''

''Basically, Tyler set the magazine up in order to quickly sell it,'' a collaborator on the first issue says. ''In those days, his major aim in life was to travel business class.'' Within the year he had upgraded to first class, with Time Inc.'s purchase of Wallpaper for $1.63 million. The question on everyone's lips at the time was, Why? A tightly niche-marketed title selling only 48,000 copies worldwide would normally fly way beneath the radar of that media behemoth. ''They wouldn't have bothered if they were out to sell a million copies,'' Brûlé admits. ''They wanted to access a whole different category of advertiser. To launch something that would grab a lot of attention but wouldn't be a huge out-of-pocket spend.''

The collaboration worked. Backed by a parent company of such magnitude, Wallpaper became a force to be reckoned with. Its sales never exceeded 150,000 worldwide, but it was stuffed full of glossy high-end advertising (bloating some issues out to 300 pages), and it exerted an influence way beyond its readership. Even people who had never bought a copy knew how to identify the aesthetic -- the austere minimalism of a white-on-white room, the deliberate monotony of some stodgy party game, a quick shopping jaunt to war-ravaged Beirut -- as ''very Wallpaper.'' The magazine was succeeding on several different fronts: holding up a campy mirror to late-90's consumerism while becoming a must-have object itself (what Noguchi coffee table would be complete without it?), increasing revenues and catapulting its editor into the heights of design-world prominence.

Despite Wallpaper's high profile, or quite likely as a result of it, the magazine began arousing the resentment of the design world's taste makers and gossips. ''It was a victim of its own success,'' reckons Marcus Field, then the editor of Blueprint. ''Designers started standing back from it.''

''Only a churl would deny the diligence and professionalism, even the fanaticism, that went into publishing Wallpaper, at least in the early days,'' says the English design critic Stephen Bayley. ''But the effect I got when I read it was more exhausting than stimulating. There was something about its relentlessness, its faddishness, its restless neophilia, its knowing smartness that was, to be frank, repulsive. Design is about the ordinary thing done extraordinarily well. Wallpaper was about meretricious exclusivity, temporary novelty and isolated privilege. Someone once said that fashion is buying things you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you don't like. Wallpaper was a fashion magazine.''